Palm CEO Ed Colligan has confirmed the new Palm OS won’t be finished until the end of 2008. Originally scheduled for release by the end of this year, the operating system’s launch date has continued to be pushed back, despite the added attention of the engineers freed up by the scrapping of Foleo last month. The new OS will allow Palm to release a whole range of products, including something similar to the ill-fated Foleo. Development is, apparently, progressing ‘as well as possibly could be expected’.
The real question is not how long the OS will be delayed, rather how long can Palm last without the new OS released?
Windows Mobile is the factual answer to your question.
Is this the best answer? Maybe no, but it’s the only answer Palm has.
And GarnetOS too, but in a less appealing way.
I would have thought Qtopia would have been a more attractive offer for an interim Palm OS.
It’s cheaper and not shooting themselves in the foot by directly introducing their customers to their biggest direct competitor.
Well, I’ve been waiting to see if a new Palm OS would see the light of day by the end of the year before I bought a smartphone, but it looks like I’ll be getting a blackberry now.
I’ve always loved Palm hardware, and PalmOS was really innovative and intuitive for a time. Too bad it is about 5 years overdue for a major rework and update. The promise of PalmOS 6 and the Linux derivative keep getting pushed back and it is really too bad. Get with the program and give me a reason to upgrade from my Treo 650 Palm.
How large is the OS code of a Palm type of machine, I thought that this type of code was the type a well running team can deliver in a one year time frame?
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Especially when it is based upon an extant OS that already runs in many embedded devices. This is an article from the tabloid press, of course, and should be taken with a grain of salt. But if the claim of 18 *more* months is correct, it calls into question the level of development expertise that Palm commands these days.
Another one bites the dust, I guess. I, for one, do *not* welcome our new Microsoft overlords. 🙁
i suspect its because they plan to add a compatibility layer on top so that it can run existing palm software.
hell, thats why palmos6 from palmsource never got used, no backwards compatiblity…
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Whatever the reason, it feels like a replay of Netscape’s demise. We get to watch , helplessly, as its market share plummets. And by the time they release the new product, few actually care. We then get to cheer as their once-dominant market share climbs back up to 5%. And again, if and when it ever reaches double digit percentages again. I’m afraid Palm can’t afford 18 more months.
In other news, Amiga hardware will be available in less than two years, /and/ there will be an OS with memory protection running on it, /and/ it’ll be bundled with Duke Nukem Forever.
Always preferred Palm. I remember fondly my unbreakable m300.
It would last about a week without charging and when I clicked stuff, it loaded right then and there. Wow! No spinning “wait” graphic, and I didn’t need to reset it every other day.
But sadly, even blistering performance and reliability can’t get away from the fact that the PalmOS is just really old
Please get it together Palm before I have to see how high my WinMobile device will bounce from a great height.
I finally found something to consider as an upgrade to my T5. The only loss of function so far is the IR port and the list of additional functions gained keeps growing. After a month, the Nokia N800 is still blowing my mind. This morning, I partitioned an SD card to break free of the 256 meg internal storage limitation; now it’s a dual boot N800 with a 1.5 gig root file system. mwahahahahaa.
No need to see how WinCE is these days. No need to consider welcoming new Redmond overlords; this little monster’s got penguin inside.
Palm, I hope you manage to find your feet before a founding father of PDA technology fades back into just another winCE vendor.
I used Palm for years. But I finally took the plunge and got a Blackberry when it was obvious that Palm was going nowhere.
Palm OS 6 needed to come out in 2005. Palm OS 5 was already outdated when I bought my Treo 650. With out Palm OS, Palm is just a middle-of-the road Windows Mobile device maker that really doesn’t have much going for it against the likes of HTC or Samsung.
When the new Palm OS comes out, it better be the best goddamn mobile OS ever. But Blackberry and Windows Mobile will have evolved so much by then that Palm OS will be obsolete the very day it comes out.
Incredible isn’t it? First they do something brilliant, and then I suppose some management consultant got brought in and suddenly they sell their USP (the software) and delay it all, and bring up prototypes not for sale and now more delays…
From my view there are 2 questions
1. When will Palm go bankrupt?
2. Which consultant company was it that screwed it up?
a? Boston Consulting Group
b? Mckinsey
c? Accenture
d? Some other blokes which really don’t have a clue..
First Palm sells PalmSource incl. all PalmOS rights to ACCESS. Then ACCESS starts developing an PalmOS-Linux hybrid. Then Palm buys back the rights to PalmOS and starts working on its own PalmOS-Linux hybrid.
Now two PalmOS-Linux hybrids are in development. That’s insane. Why can’t Palm and ACCESS not just work together? Their goals are the same. They just waste development ressources.
Edited 2007-10-04 11:02
This is getting more ridiculous every day. I remember the days when PalmOS 5 came out. It was said it would be a transitional version, until the development catches up with with ARM.
I simply don’t think that PalmOS is fubar. Simply release the native ARM SDK, remove stupid 64KB limits in the databases and there you go, no need for linux (short term). Some of the apps (Blazer f.e.) are already full ARM apps so?
The only reason I can see for linux is, that it supports far more devices thus giving you more choices for components.
You can find Treo 650 booting linux pics on the web, so can somebody tell me what the f–k they intend to be doing the next year??? Common it cannot be that hard (style-tap is a good example).
Palm just doesn’t have a strategy. Microsoft knows that it wants – to be a software developer for a lot of handhelds. Palm doesn’t know if it wants to go the Apple route (writing the software and creating the hardware) or the Samsung/HTC/etc. route and concentrate on hardware. With Palm being the only customer, this leaves ACCESS in a really weird place. There might be no market at all for what they’re making.
While Palm isn’t so far behind (Windows Mobile and Blackberry just aren’t so advanced and have significant problems of their own), they won’t catch up simply because they don’t know what they want to do.
Frankly, when Palm bought BeOS, they should have taken the plunge and made that their next generation platform. It would have required work, but it would have paid off. At this point, I think it makes sense for ACCESS to push Be. Even if they have to open-source it, they could become the RedHat of handhelds. Companies would come to them to get it running on their platform. People would buy apps from them that run on it. Being the head of an open-source project does mean that people come to you (and pay you) to do things. And Be is way more appropriate for handhelds than Linux (different things are better at different applications). Companies are already paying Microsoft a bundle for something crappy, if ACCESS jumped in the game with a nice Be for handhelds, we might see a new viable platform.
They did try to make BeOS into a new Palm OS. PalmSource used the technology from BeOS to produce Cobalt (ie Palm OS 6). Nobody ever licensed Cobalt for an actual device.
My impression is that the big flaw with Cobalt was that it was hard to write the drivers and port it to a new device. It doesn’t matter if BeOS is theoretically better embedded OS if you can’t get it running on your hardware. It sounded like one factor was that it is much easier to find Linux programmers.
Amiga, OS/2, Netscape, Real, Palm, …
Who’s gonna be next to be crushed by the Microsoft juggernaut? Adobe, then Google?
You might have a case for Netscape, but all those others f’ed themselves.
Amiga : incompetent management coasted on past achievement and failed to innovate.
OS/2 : never pushed by IBM like it should’ve been (and what was up with that stupid nun commercial ?)
Real : got greedy and wrecked their software with adware
Palm : split up a winning team, then stagnated.
MS has pulled a lot of dirty tricks but sometimes it just had to sit back and watch.
Edited 2007-10-04 18:00 UTC
You might have a case for Netscape, but all those others f’ed themselves.
didn’t netscape too have a crappy release at the time when ms was pushing ie onto its customers?
wow. that’s a small llist 😉
MS has crush far more companies than that
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 95; PalmSource; Blazer 3.0) 16;160×160
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Don’t forget the sad story of how Spyglass got swindled.
You’d think that they’d had enough software assets to take over. BeOS was quite a catch, yet, they didn’t really do anything, did they?
They seem a lot like the floundering Apple of the mid-1990s. They decent hardware but they’re not pushing it for all it’s worth.
Being that there are more smart phones on the market now, will Treo wither also? I’d rather use PalmOS simply because it works well, even if it doesn’t have the latest features but the hardware is advancing much too quickly for the software.
One person could get them back on track.
My first hand held was a palm device, I do not want the last one to be a palm. Right now I have an unlocked treo 650 and I love it. It does everything I need it to. I play MP3, watch movies and get my Blackberry emails using Blackberry connect and let me not forget google maps. I have it setup to give a different ring for each contact that calls me along with there picture. How can I forget I can even stream video and music on it. Just have not figured out flash.
The point is most people I know would buy a new treo with Garnet but they just need to price it right to stay in the game until there new OS comes out, be it from internal or from access.
I am hoping that access will deliver there version on target which is said to be first quarter of 2008.
Palm just need to put together a device that is able to do real corporate email, be touch screen, good battery , easy to use, expandable, and they will sell like crazy to the people who spends the money.
http://investor.palm.com/eventdetail.cfm?EventID=29182
Q1FY08 Results
October 1, 2007 at 1:30 PM PT
Ed Colligan –
“First, we intend to deliver the best, most highly integrated solutions for our traditional prosumer and small and medium business customers to help them more effectively manage their business and personal lives. We will continue to concentrate our development efforts on bringing Palm solutions to these customers. Our Palm systems team has just delivered the Palm Centro, the highest quality Palm smartphone solution we have ever produced. This team is now totally focused on delivering our next generation platform which we expect to be available by the end of the next calendar year. Part of that focus is making sure we do not lose the incredible ease of use and developer support we have had for more than a decade with the Palm OS. Our customers are our most important asset, and we want to be sure their transition to our next generation system, which will extend Palm’s rich heritage of innovation, is seamless.”
A friend of mine works there in enterprise telephone support. In August he assured me that the Folio was dead and that there was something really awesome in the pipeline which would compete head-on with the perceived limitations of the iPhone. He wasn’t at liberty to tell me what it was, but it was clear he had a specific product in mind.
Here’s the problem from where I stand. The OS is finely tied to the tasks it was originally designed to do and flounders when asked to act like a computer, not an address book.
The CEO has always imagined himself as the second coming of The Steve, with hubris that never manages to create The Steve’s patented Reality Distortion Field. End users have been shafted repeatedly by form factor changes functionally killing any third party hardware development it might have had.
The chief vulnerabilities of the iPhone are as follows:
Locked platform.
Locked use of wifi.
Locked carrier.
That’s. It. Palm comes out with a ‘new’ smartphone and what does it offer?
Unlocked platform (good).
No wifi, bluetooth. An all-but-dead platform for public wireless.
Sprint carrier.
And we’re looking at the same issues that plagued the mid-90s generation Palms. Frozen firmware. New incompatible form factor with expensive custom cases (because no one else wants to serve that market any more). Battery with marginal life. Apps that have to be tortured into providing multimedia functionality (the main reason the mooks bought BeOS).
I really, really want Palm to succeed. But they fail to get what Apple occasionally gets: you don’t always get to decide what the customer needs, and sometimes you have to adapt the platform radically to deliver it before someone else does.
I’ve read the last few Palm announcements on my Nokia 770. I don’t have or want a cell phone and Palm’s PDA offerings haven’t changed in years.
I bought the 770 and am ordering an N800 shortly. True, it’s not a great PDA, but it is a spectacular mini-PC. Perhaps a bit like what the Folio wanted to be?
When I first got the 770 I missed my Palm apps and syncing, once I let go of that I’ve loved using the device. Who needs Memo Pad when you have a real little text editor with no 4k limit? Who needs sync at all when everything is available on-line?
I’m sorry to say that Palm has really missed the boat. I waited with excitement for the PalmOS 6 upgrade for my Tungsten C. Years later, I’ve given up waiting and have moved on.
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Indeed. I have a couple of N770s and they absolutely *rock*. You are right. They are not PDAs. Which is fine, because I don’t want one. (PIMSs are for dweebs!) 😉
I want a handheld PC. It’s definitely the best handheld device that I’ve had since my HP200LX.
with in 18 months… Apple will have a larger marketshare… WAY more advanced hard where and OSX touch running third party aps including a PALM emulator!!!
besides… did’nt palm swith to windows mobile any way….
they should just close up shoppe… and give the money back to the share holders….
Honestly I don’t see the value in PalmOS applications.
Everyone touts that there are thousands and thousands of apps available for PalmOS. “So what?” is my response to them.
The PalmOS has been stagnant for years. These thousands and thousands of applications simply have no value. The most *important* apps will bring out clients in almost no time if Palm chose to break away and create a brand new OS without any ties to the past.
If apple *wanted to* they could add more PIM stuff to their iPod touch, get some software devs in to get some of these critical/important apps going and it’s lights out for palm. Both the smartphone crowd and the PDA crowd will be satisfied with offerings from RIM, Apple, Danger, Nokia, Microsoft or SonyEricsson.
Palm is the Amiga of the 2000’s
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Do you think that you can just slap together an epic fiasco like the New Amiga in just a year or two? People have spent years crafting press releases full of empty promises. And it takes a long time, with each one, for people to even realize that they were empty. Much care and planning is required to pull off an “Amiga”. Palm may very well get there. But they need to wait their turn. And put in the time and hard work that it takes to achieve the level of rarified, but perrenially sustained, vaporism which the architects of the “New Amiga” have achieved.
Please do not demean those “working” on the New Amiga by attributing the New Amiga’s lofty and vaporous status to mere wannabe beginners. 😉
direction or the lack of it is the current problem palm has. I couldn’t believe when I read that foleo wasn’t even source compatible with the future linux based palmos. they need somebody who has a vision (not unlike jobs). they were the leaders now they cannot decide what exactly they want to do. this uncerntainity is making the last loyal palm devs switch to other platforms or at least makes them look elsewhere. there won’t be any devs left in one year to actually develop for their new platform when/if palm releases it.
Browser: Palm680/RC1 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-D053; Blazer/4.5) 16;320×320
Palm was pretty cool when it first came out. But those days are long gone.
I will watch my Etrade account grow as all the “old-timers”– Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile– fall before the iPhone.